"Many jazz fans simply refer to [hard bop] as the Blue Note sound in deference to the record label most closely associated with the glory days of hard bop in the 1950s and 1960s. As the name hard bop indicates, the leading performers of this new idiom learned from their bebop predecessors. But they also borrowed techniques from other styles of populist music. The resulting hybrid artfully mixed the sophistication of modern jazz with a rough-and-tumble swagger, brash and bluesy, that never let you forget this music's proletarian pedigree."